scholarly journals Analyzing the Driving Forces behind CO2 Emissions in Energy-Resource-Poor and Fossil-Fuel-Centered Economies: Case Studies from Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (17) ◽  
pp. 5351
Author(s):  
Yun-Hsun Huang ◽  
Jung-Hua Wu ◽  
Hao-Syuan Huang

Based on the strong similarities between energy-resource-poor and fossil-fuel-centered economies (e.g., Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea) in terms of economy, culture, and energy usage characteristics, they should be analyzed collectively. This study adopted two-tier input-output structural decomposition analysis to identify the driving forces behind CO2 emissions to these countries to the formulation of effective environmental policy. Data from the World Input-Output Database was used to decompose relative changes in CO2 emissions into a range of technological advances, factor substitution, and final demand effects. Technological advances in energy (direct) contributed to a 77% reduction in Taiwan and a 34% reduction in South Korea. This is a clear indication that improving energy efficiency via technological advances should be a priority. In Japan in particular, there was a 22% reduction in CO2 emissions attributable to technological advances in materials; hence, it is recommended that Taiwan and South Korea work to extensively develop eco-industrial parks to create industry clusters to promote resource/energy efficiency and reductions in CO2 emissions. Decomposition results based on factor substitution revealed that a variety of strategies will be required, such as switching to fuels that are less carbon intensive, promoting the adoption of renewable energies, and implementing clean-coal technologies.

Author(s):  
Clark W. Gellings ◽  
Arshad Mansoor

The objectives of this paper are to examine the benefits of electric end-use energy efficiency as well as the potential cost to enhancing the current electric distribution system, to examine the quantifiable impact of electric end-use energy efficiency as an energy resource, to suggest critical technological advances that must be made to the current electric distribution system to enable greater use of electric end-use energy efficiency, and to summarize a proposed technology R&D initiative.


2014 ◽  
Vol 700 ◽  
pp. 739-742
Author(s):  
Yi Cao ◽  
Shui Jun Peng ◽  
Wen Cheng Zhang

This paper estimates the changes of industrial embodied energy consumption in China between 1997 and 2007, and applies a structural decomposition analysis (SDA), based on non-competitive (import) input-output tables, to analyze the sources of change of China’s energy consumption from 1997 to 2007. Results show that China’s energy consumption increased sharply, especially after the accession to WTO. The SDA results indicate that the improvement of energy efficiency during 1997-2007 significantly reduced energy consumption in China while the growth of final demand was the key driver of China’s energy consumption. In addition, distribution of final demand with the declining share of consumption and the increasing share of export push energy consumption upward.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Na Wang ◽  
Yongrok Choi

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the technology gap, energy efficiency, and CO2 emission performance of the agglomerated cities in Eastern and Central China and South Korea under economic heterogeneity. The potential reductions of energy and CO2 emission are estimated from agglomerated city perspectives. The global meta-frontier non-radial direction distance function is used to conduct an empirical analysis of agglomerated cities among Eastern, Central China and South Korea. The results show the potential reduction of 7.58 billion tons of CO2 emissions in Korea and another potential reduction of 1930.62 toe energy for the research period in China, if Korea and China proactively collaborate with each other. The empirical results conclude several unique findings and their implications. First, there are significant differences between the Chinese and Korean cities, in energy efficiency, CO2 emission performance, and meta-technology gaps. Korean cities play a leading role at benchmarking efficiency level with meta-frontier technology. Second, there is no significant difference between total-factor and single-factor performance indexes in the Korean cities, because South Korea requires large capital stocks to replace energy in the production process. However, the opposite is true for Eastern and Central China cities. Finally, there is huge potential for the Chinese cities to reduce energy and CO2 emissions by “catching up” internally as well as by the collaborative efforts with Korean cities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 4175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gideon Nkam Taka ◽  
Ta Thi Huong ◽  
Izhar Hussain Shah ◽  
Hung-Suck Park

Ethiopia, among the fastest growing economies worldwide, is witnessing rapid urbanization and industrialization that is fueled by greater energy consumption and high levels of CO2 emissions. Currently, Ethiopia is the third largest CO2 emitter in East Africa, yet no comprehensive study has characterized the major drivers of economy-wide CO2 emissions. This paper examines the energy-related CO2 emissions in Ethiopia, and their driving forces between 1990 and 2017 using Kaya identity combined with Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition approach. Main findings reveal that energy-based CO2 emissions have been strongly driven by the economic effect (52%), population effect (43%), and fossil fuel mix effect (40%) while the role of emission intensity effect (14%) was less pronounced during the study period. At the same time, energy intensity improvements have slowed down the growth of CO2 emissions by 49% indicating significant progress towards reduced energy per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) during 1990-2017. Nonetheless, for Ethiopia to achieve its 2030 targets of low-carbon economy, further improvements through reduced emission intensity (in the industrial sector) and fossil fuel share (in the national energy mix) are recommended. Energy intensity could be further improved by technological innovation and promotion of energy-frugal industries.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinying Qin ◽  
Dan Tong ◽  
Fei Liu ◽  
Ruili Wu ◽  
Bo Zheng ◽  
...  

The past three decades have witnessed the dramatic expansion of global biomass- and fossil fuel-fired power plants, but the tremendously diverse power infrastructure shapes different spatial and temporal CO2 emission characteristics. Here, by combining Global Power plant Emissions Database (GPED v1.1) constructed in this study and the previously developed China coal-fired power Plant Emissions Database (CPED), we analyzed global and regional changes in generating capacities, age structure, and CO2 emissions by fuel type and unit size, and further identified the major driving forces of these global and regional structure and emission trends over the past 30 years. Accompanying the growth of fossil fuel- and biomass-burning installed capacity from 1,774 GW in 1990 to 4,139 GW in 2019 (a 133.3% increase), global CO2 emissions from the power sector relatively increased from 7.5 Gt to 13.9 Gt (an 85.3% increase) during the same period. However, diverse developments and transformations of regional power units in fuel types and structure characterized various regional trends of CO2 emissions. For example, in the United States and Europe, CO2 emissions from power plants peaked before 2005, driven by the utilization of advanced electricity technologies and the switches from coal to gas fuel at the early stage. It is estimated the share of identified low-efficiency coal power capacity decreased to 4.3% in the United States and 0.6% in Europe with respectively 2.1% and 13.2% thermal efficiency improvements from 1990-2019. In contrast, CO2 emissions in China, India, and the rest of world are still steadily increasing because the growing demand for electricity is mainly met by developing carbon-intensive but less effective coal power capacity. The index decomposition analysis (IDA) to identify the multi-stage driving forces on the trends of CO2 emissions further suggests different global and regional characteristics. Globally, the growth of demand mainly drives the increase of CO2 emissions for all stages (i.e. 1990-2000, 2000-2010 and 2010-2019). Regional results support the critical roles of thermal efficiency improvement (accounting for 20% of the decrease in CO2 emissions) and fossil fuel mix (61%) in preventing CO2 emission increases in the developed regions (e.g., the United States and Europe). The decrease of fossil fuel share gradually demonstrates its importance in carrying the positive effects on curbing emissions in the most of regions, including the developing economics (i.e. China and India) after 2010 (accounting for 46% of the decrease in CO2 emissions). Our results highlight the contributions of different driving forces to emissions have significantly changed over the past 30 years, and this comprehensive analysis indicates that the structure optimization and transformations of power plants is paramount importance to curb or further reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector in the future.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 4343
Author(s):  
Dan Wu ◽  
Ching-Cheng Lu ◽  
Xiang Chen ◽  
Pei-Chieh Tu ◽  
An-Chi Yang ◽  
...  

This study introduces the translation adjustment model of Seiford and Zhu (2002) into dynamic DEA models to measure and analyze the dynamic energy efficiency of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies from 2010 to 2014. The APEC economies are divided into annual energy and overall energy efficiency ratings, and improvement directions are proposed for the different variables. With the proposal of magnitude, this study discusses the changes in intertemporal conversion variables and proposes suggestions for improvement. Finally, this study analyzes the implications of energy investment and the efficiency policies of APEC economies. The results show that economies with the lowest overall energy efficiency ratings have great potential for improvement. Reducing capital stock, labor, fossil fuel consumption, and CO2 emissions while increasing GDP can increase energy efficiency ratings. However, economies do not want to reduce the state’s capital stock, and labor and population birth adjustments are difficult. Energy efficiency can only start by adjusting the consumption of fossil fuels, CO2 emissions, and GDP. The results indicate that to improve energy efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, economies are expected to increase their GDP unless they enact cuts through policy and technical approaches, appropriately adjust their energy policies, and actively develop new energy technologies to effectively reduce CO2 emissions and achieve optimal energy efficiency.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 93-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shan Guo ◽  
Ling Shao ◽  
H. Chen ◽  
Z. Li ◽  
J.B. Liu ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
YoungSeok Hwang ◽  
Jung-Sup Um ◽  
Stephan Schlüter

The IPAT/Kaya identity is the most popular index used to analyze the driving forces of individual factors on CO2 emissions. It represents the CO2 emissions as a product of factors, such as the population, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, energy intensity of the GDP, and carbon footprint of energy. In this study, we evaluated the mutual relationship of the factors of the IPAT/Kaya identity and their decomposed variables with the fossil-fuel CO2 flux, as measured by the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT). We built two regression models to explain this flux; one using the IPAT/Kaya identity factors as the explanatory variables and the other one using their decomposed factors. The factors of the IPAT/Kaya identity have less explanatory power than their decomposed variables and comparably low correlation with the fossil-fuel CO2 flux. However, the model using the decomposed variables shows significant multicollinearity. We performed a multivariate cluster analysis for further investigating the benefits of using the decomposed variables instead of the original factors. The results of the cluster analysis showed that except for the M factor, the IPAT/Kaya identity factors are inadequate for explaining the variations in the fossil-fuel CO2 flux, whereas the decomposed variables produce reasonable clusters that can help identify the relevant drivers of this flux.


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